Life Along The Delaware Bay

I didn’t make it to the beach to witness the annual rites of spring of the Horseshoe Crabs (Limulus polyphemus). But I did manage a virtual trip with this beautiful book. Life Along The Delaware: Cape May, Gateway to a Million Shorebirds by Niles, Burger, and Dey, with photography by van de Kam, was published by Rutgers University Press last year. It’s a coffee table book with luscious photographs, but also one with a scientific bent. Indeed, even a point. The Bay is one of the most important ecosystems on the East Coast, but isn’t nearly as well-known as the Chesapeake. It’s especially important for shorebirds in migration, those epic flights to and from breeding grounds in Arctic Canada. For at least since the last ice age, this migration has coincided with the annual Horseshoe Crab breeding season. Massive amounts of Horseshoe eggs fed these long distance migrants, providing a vital half-way point. After more than a century of slaughtering Horseshoes for fertilizer, bait, and medicine, there are now many less Horseshoe crabs. Hence, less birds. A subspecies of Red Knot (Calidris canutus) in particular has been hard hit. These birds are known to fly six days straight (songbirds migrate during the evenings only, resting and eating during the day); indeed, before starting from Patagonia, Red Knots shrink their digestive systems to lessen their weight (mirroring the ability of birds to shrink their gonads once breeding season is over). The easily digested, protein-rich Horseshoe eggs are vital to the survival of the Red Knots. This is the main story told in this book, but it’s not the only one. It’s thoughtful, up-to-date, and, as noted, extremely well-illustrated.

Two punks from Bergen Beach were recently busted for poaching horseshoes from Jamaica Bay. Telsons should to driven into their gonads. They were caught pretty much by accident, by NYPD detectives testing night-vision gear in a helicopter. Park Police have a boat, but it remains tied to the dock.